About My Site’s Former Logo

I wanted to share about the evolution of the artwork on the header of my site. The pieces I’ve used are part of a series of four drawings that I’ve kept close to the vest for years, hoping to include them as chapter headings in my memoir when it is published.

I used this drawing (shown on the left) of a psychiatric restraining chair since the first draft of my site. I kept this version of the chair, unbroken as it appeared in my life at 21 – yet to be conquered by my journey of transforming psychiatric trauma through art. I often wanted to use a later drawing in the series, as it would represent the hope of escape which was a hope I always want to offer with my work, but moving to the next piece in the series didn’t feel right until recently.

I knew this frightening image of a tool of torture could be off-putting to visitors–a frightening image of pain and violation of psychiatry. The chair represented my life as it was before I broke free of the trauma enforced on me by hanging on through the fight of my life. But, I also knew that the pain this chair represents, this image of evisceration of human rights and of self, for so many is still a reality. So, I kept it for a long time.

I updated it today. The image that is there now is the first evolution in this series of drawings with the chair broken in half showing a bird flying out from in between. The bird in the center flying off represents freedom, however each of us finds it, from the prisons we find ourselves in – whether those are built by others, or those we built inside ourselves.

Below is a story from my memoir that explains this series of artwork and how I came to create it. In solidarity always. Psychiatric trauma is real trauma.

Restraining Chair

I was so young, I thought as I drove. 21, only 21 during my first involuntary hospitalization. The thought sped through my mind as I sped down the road late one night in the winter of 2019. At 21, I was too skinny, too idealistic, living off of cigarettes and coffee, pot and alcohol, writing wild incomprehensible poetry, and loving all my friends so carelessly. I was too young for that much terror.

This truth had never been so alive in me than behind the wheel that night—the truth of my suffering that followed four hospitalizations in mental institutions, a diagnosis of bipolar, and the years of treatment and trauma that followed. It had lived in me, the sense that yes, I had suffered, but I had never let it truly surface. Not until Jill, my new therapist—the only therapist that ever asked—asked the question: “What happened to you in the hospitals?” I was so young, I kept thinking as I made my way down the dark roads.

A memory appeared in my mind, uninvited, bright, solid, whole—with every detail I had stored there all those years. It was a wooden, upright restraining chair with leather straps two inches thick. This monster had appeared in my life during my second hospitalization, just days after the attacks on 9/11 while in 24-hour holding. The planks of wood were so thick they could resist any strain and bring anyone captured in it to heel. It was a living symbol of every nuanced oppression that had been enforced on me. The chair sat next to the cell I was isolated in when I was committed. The cell with only the tiny green ceramic tiles, a sick puke green, and a bare, battered old mattress that leaked the stench of sweat into the strange air surrounding it, which was captured and frozen there, like me. 

As the chair was meant to exist at the time, it existed in my mind that night; it was a threat. The memory became horrifyingly real, wild, somehow animated even in its bracing stillness. I started breathing heavily, uncontrollably. I started crying at the sight of it in my mind and all it represented, then sobbing. Heaving, losing the air, I started to feel dizzy. I pulled over and tried to slow my breath into a reliable rhythm, in and out. The chair loomed in my mind along with that piercing thought, I was so young.

At that time, I had been slowly coming off a cocktail of five drugs. I had taken my last dose of Lexapro in October and I was beginning to get off of an antipsychotic called Latuda. I was on a dose 20 milligrams above the maximum, not for psychosis, but for depression. The standard was for bipolar patients to use antipsychotics as antidepressants to avoid mania. After my last dose that December, the extreme and constant suicidality that was different from anything I had experienced prior and had persisted for almost five years ended abruptly. I found that my anxiety plummeted. I had more energy and focus. People around me were beginning to see a difference. I had never felt so alive.

That winter night on the drive marked a month since I had come off the Latuda, and the beginning of the decision to try to wean carefully off the three other drugs I was still on. Since I was 21, I had been on 17 different drugs, each with its own profile of theft: my weight, my cognition, my energy. None offered the healing they promised. I just barely survived the Latuda—somewhere in the space between my mouth, a handful of Xanax, and a bottle of vodka, I survived.

It was a brutal betrayal when I realized that a lot of what I had experienced—what nearly tore me and my loved ones to pieces—was a side effect of a psychiatric drug. Yet that side effect was instead attributed to me and my chemistry. To my supposed inability to find worth in this life. A sense of true empowerment arose as I realized I was okay, even better than ever independent of this drug, a drug that I was told was saving something in me, something only it could fix. A drug I was told I would be on for the rest of my life. 

This fact, the fact that those years of suffering, even the years before, were a result of what was meant to heal me, had struck my mind like lightning, leaving in its wake such anger. Yet, mercifully, it came with the sense, in a breath, that I had finally survived. I had finally broken free from psychiatry, within my mind and in my body. 

As my breathing calmed, on the shoulder of the road too small for even my Yaris, I knew exactly what I was meant to do with this awoken memory of this chair: I was meant to transform this trauma. My art practice had surfaced with a different force with this new life within me. My art took on a new role in my life, a new transformative power. I saw this chair, I stared it down and knew it was my turn to restrain it. In the realm of imagination and creativity, this trauma was at my mercy. I would destroy it, the memory, the image, its power. I would break and smash and destroy it anyway I wanted. I would do what I wished to its terror. 

Where it lived in me suddenly changed. It was now a force I controlled. My mind began to attack it. Change its form, its lines, its shape, its color. In my imagination, the straps whipped like snakes in the air and then, in a betrayal, wrapped themselves around the chair itself, snapping in place, bringing the chair to heel. A visual art piece began to form, a three-part piece that told the story of my trauma. The story of how I survived psychiatry.